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Hello

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and welcome to another episode of the Tyndale House podcast.

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Today, I'm delighted to be joined by Christopher Ash,

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who is Writer in Residence here at Tyndale House, and has been hanging

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around the library for a few years now as Writer in Residence.

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What does that actually mean, Christopher?

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It's a wonderful job.

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I have no duties, and it means I have a desk,

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and I have a base to work and some lovely people to get to know.

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Wonderful.

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Well, we very much appreciate you and Carolyn

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and your your pastoral care of, staff and readers alike.

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It's great having you around, but we are talking today

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not because you're a writer in residence, but because of these monster volumes,

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which a full volume commentary on the Psalms,

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which I guess took a couple of days to write.

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Yeah, two or three. Yeah. And so

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tell us about the gestation process of these.

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How long have you been working on them? Why?

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Why did you even set about such a monstrous task?

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It's a really good question.

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There's a lot of Psalms and a lot of words in the commentary.

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How many? About three quarters of a million.

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That's a lot of … Whether they're good, who knows?

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Time will tell.

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I've had a gradually growing love affair with the Psalms.

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It started in London teaching Old Testament poetry

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and particularly Psalms to students on the Cornhill Training Course.

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And then just gradually worrying away at them and trying to understand

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them better, writing one or two lighter, shorter books on the Psalms.

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And then I suggested to Crossway, the American publisher,

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maybe having a go at a longer one.

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And Justin Taylor, who's their

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head of their book division, said two or three volumes.

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I said, well, maybe three, and then it became four.

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So why did it become four?

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Because you needed so much in the introduction? No.

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Yes. Yes, it became four because the suggestion was made that

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the introductory volume might be a…  it was going to be a standalone volume.

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and then the thought was that it might be better if it was part of the set.

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Yeah. Great.

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It is a fabulous set.

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It’s beautifully produced.

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I have to confess, I have not read it all yet.

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That's very disappointing.

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I know, I know,

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because it was the beginning of this week that you lent these to me.

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Yes, you've had all these, you know, hours.

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I know, but there we are.

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You can't get the staff these days.

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But what I have read in volume one

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is wonderful, as I expected.

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I've read your previous books on Psalms, or at least some of them.

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And the two ‘Teaching the Psalms’ volumes and ‘Psalms for You’.

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They're great.

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And so I came to this

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expecting further, deeper riches.

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And that's exactly what you're getting with this.

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It's just wonderful.

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So it's a delight to see them out, having

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talked to you at several points on the last part of the journey,

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as you've been getting them, getting them done and off.

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So, yeah, it's great.

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What you're very kind, Tony.

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And certainly Crossway have produced them beautifully.

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They are. They’re, they are beautiful.

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They will look good on on any sets of shelves.

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They will, even if they stay on the shelves.

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Whether that be rather more useful on the desks.

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But have

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they take up a lot of room so they can't be on the desk all the time.

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Now, you argue in here that Psalms are essential

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for Christians and for the Church,

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and that Christ is central to the Psalms.

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And that seems to make this approach,

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not unique but quite distinctive, because it seems to me

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there are lot of commentaries on the Psalms that don't

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see either of those things in those terms.

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Do you want to unpack those two questions for us, and why…

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The first conviction of the importance of the Psalms

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is, and I haven't spent very much time on that, but

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in terms of Christian history, it's pretty mainstream that the Psalms

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should be part of our corporate worship, our corporate lives of prayer and praise.

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And, I suppose the basis is Ephesians 5 and Colossians

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3, where Paul speaks of, just in passing really almost, of

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Christian churches singing

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psalms, hymns, spiritual songs, which primarily

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I think means Psalms.

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And he just assumes that churches will do that.

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And the associations in both Ephesians in Colossians with the church,

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with the filling of the Spirit, with life in Christ, with godliness,

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suggest that there’s great blessing in that

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and so I’m one of probably a number of voices saying,

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let's try and get the Psalms back into our church life.

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So that's the first part of it.

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The argument that the Psalms are inseparable from Christ

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is… I mean, I sometimes slightly mischievously say that I've been trying

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to reconnect with the first three quarters of Christian history.

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That's a little bit mischievous, but there's something in that

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because it's very striking.

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And one of the things I most enjoyed writing

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in volume one was,

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rather shallow, but a sort of attempt

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at an overview of how the Psalms have been read

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in Christian history.

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And it's just very striking.

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I mean, obviously it's a huge, you know, century after century,

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all sorts of riches and nuances and so on.

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But it's very striking that when you read the patristic writers

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and one or two of the medieval, I think probably most of the medieval writers,

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and then the Renaissance, the Reformation writers –

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Christ is everywhere really.

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Right.

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I mean, there are differences in the ways in which

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they relate the Psalms to Christ, but

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they read the Psalms as Christian

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literature unashamedly, really.

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It's very striking and so I've, what I've tried to do,

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I've tried to argue it from the Psalter

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and from the New Testament quotations and echoes.

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Yes. Right.

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We'll come back to that

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in a second, but since you've commented on the historical side

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and the way the Psalms have been read down through history, what went wrong?

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Why… you said the first three quarters of Christian history,

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why did the Psalms become maybe marginalized, but,

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well, yeah, marginalized in some sense,

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relativised perhaps in a sense? Yes.

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Yeah, why did we take a wrong turn?

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I suppose there are two questions.

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One is why are Psalms in many of our churches

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preached occasionally, but not much else?

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They're not sung or said much.

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Right.

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And that's … I'm not quite sure why that is, though

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I suspect that a culture of entertainment has something to do with it, but

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we find stylistically that Psalms

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don't quite fit with the way we like to sing.

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And I'm not competent, really, to judge that. Interesting.

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But there's something in that, I suspect.

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Do you know when that shift happened in most …?

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No, I don’t.

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But it's interesting that in … I mean, I was brought up in Anglican

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churches, and, I mean, when I was an undergraduate here in Cambridge

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at the Round Church, we sang Psalms, we chanted Psalms.

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We didn't always do it very well,

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but that was just the normal thing in Anglican churches that you did.

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Yeah.

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So I guess it's in the last half century that it's

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drifted out of favour, certainly in evangelical or Reformed.

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Right. Anglican churches.

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Yeah. Interesting.

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Yeah, I grew up

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in a free church background, and they were not a big part of it at all.

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I don't I don't ever remember us … we certainly never singing Psalms.

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That was a very Anglican thing to do in our heads, I think.

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So yeah, that's interesting.

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I don't know why.

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I don't know why, the reason for that.

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But the reason for Christ becoming marginal

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in our reading of the Psalms is, I think, very interesting,

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because there has been very considerable eclipse, really, of Christ.

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You pick a scholarly commentary off the shelves,

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or even a popular commentary in the last few decades, and

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Christ may not be there at all.

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Or Christ may be a sort of footnote or an end note:

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Oh, by the way, the New Testament echoes some of that somehow.

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But it would be an overstatement to say that Christ was central

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to the way the Psalms, presented.

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And I think that goes back to

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the so-called enlightenment.

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The movement, again, away from trusting the superscription

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was very important, I think, in that.

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Right.

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Why do you think, sorry, why do you think the superscriptions

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made a difference to the way that we see them as Christ centred?

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Yes. I think because they … the superscript … and this has come back –

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I mean, it's a big subject of scholarly study in recent decades,

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and the recognition that the Psalter is intentionally redacted,

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it's put together in purposeful ways, even if we can't be sure about everything.

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But there are pretty clear indications

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of purpose in the shape of the Psalter.

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And one of the

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takeaways from that has been the sense

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that the Psalter in itself is forward facing.

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There's something about an expectation of …

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that Psalm 2 will be fulfilled.

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Even though at the end of the compilation of the Psalter, where

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in or after the exile, there's no king,

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there's no sign of Psalm 2 being fulfilled, but there’s

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a number of indications in the Psalter that there's that expectation.

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But if you if you dismiss, as Gunkel

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did, the superscriptions as

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not giving historical information,

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and therefore not relevant, Right.

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then you lose all that. Yeah.

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That's interesting.

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Do you think that

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… Or, yeah, how would you respond to the charge

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that you see the Psalms as forward looking

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because you are coming to it wanting to see Christ there?

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Yes, yes.

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And that if you weren't, you wouldn't see it as forward looking.

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How would you respond… And that you’re reading Christ into the Psalms? Yes.

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What I've tried to do in the first volume is a sort of

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hermeneutical pincer movement, really, to start with the Psalter and see what

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indications might there be in the Psalter that cry out for completion.

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And the biggest is the King. Yeah, right.

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The prevalence of the king, of David at the head of nearly half the Psalms,

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the 13 historical superscriptions

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about the life of David; the positioning of David: Psalm 2,

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and then Psalm 72 and Psalm 89, you know, very significant placings.

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And the two big ‘Of David’ collections in books five.

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Yeah. Very interesting.

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You know, why do you … why, after the exile, do you put these ‘Of

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David’ collections in Book 5: 108,

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9, 10, and then 138 to 145.

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Because it does look like Book five is post-exilic in its framing.

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Yes, it rather suggests that.

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I mean Psalm 137 would suggest that about Babylon.

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Yeah.

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Yeah, so then then your conviction is that

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the Psalms that are genuinely

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by David, hence the [Hebrew] *ledavid* Yes.

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superscription.

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They've been put into that collection,

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but you would reject the idea that they are post-exilic Psalms

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that have been … had an ‘of David’

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superscription because … in order to evoke David in some way.

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Yes, yes.

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Which is very popular, isn't it, in scholarly circles.

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You know, the idea that the superscriptions are,

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well, that ‘of David’, for example, is an indication of authorship

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and reliable is a very marginal position.

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I've tried to argue it in an appendix, and it was just

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interesting studying for that

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the superscription were accepted

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and then they were rejected,

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and one of the reasons they were rejected is that it was said

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that the content of the Psalms didn't relate to the superscription.

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Right.

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And then in more recent years, people have said,

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Yeah, well, they're not historical, but there's some very significant links

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between them.

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At which point you're thinking,

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yeah, well, maybe, maybe there's a reason for that.

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And so it's sort of … it hasn't come full circle, Right.

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Yeah.

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but I would be one of those rather

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rare voices arguing that maybe it should.

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Right.

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And they’d be questioning the superscription on the basis

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that we can't work out how the Psalm works in relation to David,

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actually is more about our inability to read the Psalm properly

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rather than about the superscription, and … Yes, yes.

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And you're arguing that

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that seeing them as Christ centred actually helps in that process.

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Yes. If I understand correctly.

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Yes, yes, yes.

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I'm arguing that seeing – well, particularly seeing David as a foreshadowing of

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the greater King,

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brings Psalms into focus, which otherwise would be

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puzzling.

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Yeah, right.

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So can you give us an example of that?

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Well, I suppose, Psalm 22 would be an example, Right.

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where ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ – this,

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this tremendous suffering that

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David speaks of experiencing.

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And then two thirds of the way through the Psalm,

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he says, ‘I’m going to proclaim your name to my brothers.

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I’m going to … In the great congregation I'm going to sing your praises.’

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And you're thinking, so where did that come from?

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And you can say, well,

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maybe there was some experience in David's life of suffering,

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and then there was some vindication, some victory.

00:15:08:05 - 00:15:12:19
But it feels pretty big.

00:15:13:17 - 00:15:15:06
Yeah. Right.

00:15:15:06 - 00:15:19:06
And you when the New Testament quotes … well Jesus quotes,

00:15:19:24 - 00:15:22:21
‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ most famously,

00:15:22:21 - 00:15:26:17
and then when the Letter to the Hebrews quotes, ‘I’m going to proclaim

00:15:26:17 - 00:15:31:15
your name amongst my brothers,’ you're thinking, well, maybe they were right.

00:15:31:15 - 00:15:34:15
Maybe, maybe there's something there that Yes

00:15:34:18 - 00:15:38:22
makes sense, that takes David's experience

00:15:39:01 - 00:15:42:01
and sees it as real,

00:15:42:08 - 00:15:45:08
but a foreshadowing of something bigger.

00:15:45:16 - 00:15:46:00
Yeah.

00:15:47:22 - 00:15:48:05
Okay.

00:15:48:05 - 00:15:50:03
That's, that's great.

00:15:50:03 - 00:15:54:04
You have a number of core convictions about how

00:15:55:14 - 00:15:59:17
the Psalms relate to Christ that are related to what you've just been saying.

00:16:00:21 - 00:16:03:03
What, what are those convictions

00:16:03:03 - 00:16:06:03
and why do you hold them so strongly?

00:16:06:12 - 00:16:09:12
Yes, yes.

00:16:09:13 - 00:16:13:22
I guess the most important test from my point of view was trying to do

00:16:13:22 - 00:16:17:02
as carefully study as I could, not only of the quotations

00:16:17:02 - 00:16:21:21
in the New Testament, but of clear or reasonably clear echoes.

00:16:22:08 - 00:16:23:05
And that's obviously

00:16:23:05 - 00:16:26:07
something where people can argue about whether something is an echo or not.

00:16:26:07 - 00:16:29:22
But nonetheless, there's a fair bit of echoing going on.

00:16:29:23 - 00:16:32:06
Right. Some very clear.

00:16:32:06 - 00:16:35:06
And you're using the word echo rather than allusions there

00:16:35:13 - 00:16:38:01
because it's … \ Yes, I'm using echo because

00:16:41:02 - 00:16:42:11
I suppose

00:16:42:11 - 00:16:46:06
I'm not necessarily talking about a conscious Right.

00:16:46:06 - 00:16:49:06
allusion by the author.

00:16:49:21 - 00:16:52:24
It may or may not have been, but … By the human author.

00:16:53:03 - 00:16:56:03
By the human author. Yes, exactly. Exactly.

00:16:56:10 - 00:17:00:07
Because I think human authorial intent is often a good principle,

00:17:00:07 - 00:17:05:02
but it has difficulties if, as Peter suggested … Well, Peter

00:17:05:02 - 00:17:12:04
teaches in 1 Peter 1, the prophets who are speaking by the Spirit of Christ,

00:17:12:04 - 00:17:15:10
and they were searching and inquiring, and there was something going on

00:17:15:10 - 00:17:17:10
that was bigger than what they were Yes.

00:17:17:10 - 00:17:19:21
perhaps entirely consciously saying. Yeah.

00:17:19:21 - 00:17:22:20
So they write more than they they can know in some sense.

00:17:22:20 - 00:17:24:02
Yes, yes.

00:17:24:02 - 00:17:26:03
It is undoubtedly true of prophecies. Yeah.

00:17:26:03 - 00:17:29:08
I mean even, you know, Ciaphas in John 11 Yeah.

00:17:29:16 - 00:17:33:03
As you can ask, what's his intention in prophesying ‘It's better

00:17:33:03 - 00:17:34:17
for one man to die for the people’?

00:17:34:17 - 00:17:38:19
Answer: his conscious intention is pretty obviously straightforwardly political.

00:17:39:06 - 00:17:41:05
But he spoke better than he knew. Yes.

00:17:41:05 - 00:17:42:11
Yeah, absolutely.

00:17:42:11 - 00:17:44:11
So there … You see there are,

00:17:44:11 - 00:17:46:19
there are echoes … Sorry, I cut across what you were saying.

00:17:46:19 - 00:17:50:08
Yes. And, and, and, and what I tried to do was I tried to

00:17:51:22 - 00:17:53:14
sort of collect together the echoes

00:17:53:14 - 00:17:57:24
and then tried to think, how do these … how can you classify them?

00:17:57:24 - 00:18:00:24
How can you sort of fit them together theologically?

00:18:01:03 - 00:18:04:03
And it was really interesting because

00:18:04:14 - 00:18:07:20
huge numbers related to the Lord

00:18:07:20 - 00:18:11:20
Jesus Christ in his incarnation, in his human

00:18:12:22 - 00:18:15:18
nature, in his sufferings,

00:18:15:18 - 00:18:19:02
as the King who prayed for an expected

00:18:19:02 - 00:18:22:02
vindication, as the teacher

00:18:22:22 - 00:18:26:17
teaching his people – the covenant head of them, you know, the covenant King

00:18:26:17 - 00:18:32:13
teaching his people – all sorts of things which which related to Christ.

00:18:32:21 - 00:18:35:14
But the really interesting thing was

00:18:35:14 - 00:18:38:13
that you also got this sort of overflow

00:18:38:13 - 00:18:41:05
again and again where … So,

00:18:41:05 - 00:18:44:05
the sufferings in the Psalms

00:18:45:06 - 00:18:47:04
are understood by the New Testament

00:18:47:04 - 00:18:50:04
as fulfilled in the sufferings of Christ,

00:18:51:01 - 00:18:54:19
but they're also understood as overflowing to the sufferings of the Church.

00:18:54:19 - 00:18:59:01
So Psalm 44, we’re as, you know, sheep to the slaughter and so on, Romans

00:18:59:01 - 00:19:03:07
8 says, that’s, that's what it is to be the Church of Christ.

00:19:04:01 - 00:19:08:06
And I found myself profoundly agreeing with … I mean, Augustine

00:19:08:06 - 00:19:12:10
makes such a big deal of Acts 9: ‘Saul,

00:19:12:10 - 00:19:16:01
Saul, why are you persecuting me?’ Right.

00:19:16:10 - 00:19:22:05
And the other New Testament teachings about the Church as the body of Christ.

00:19:22:05 - 00:19:26:08
And so he had this big thing of the whole Christ, head and members.

00:19:26:08 - 00:19:27:03
Yeah, right.

00:19:27:03 - 00:19:29:22
And, which is not Augustine, it's the New Testament, but

00:19:31:10 - 00:19:32:24
he made it … He talked about it quite strongly.

00:19:32:24 - 00:19:34:24
He talked about it quite a bit. Yeah.

00:19:34:24 - 00:19:38:23
And I found myself thinking, Yes, I think, I think that's profoundly right.

00:19:39:01 - 00:19:44:02
The, the, the Psalms are, are saying, yes, this is

00:19:45:13 - 00:19:50:11
Christ's songbook, but it's the songbook of all

00:19:50:11 - 00:19:54:12
who are in Christ, and therefore it is our songbook Right.

00:19:54:12 - 00:19:57:03
as we are in Christ.

00:19:57:03 - 00:19:59:23
So we'll come back to this

00:19:59:23 - 00:20:03:09
a little bit later in a bit more detail,

00:20:03:09 - 00:20:07:00
but it's one of the things we do with the Psalms in the modern world

00:20:07:00 - 00:20:09:06
is that we apply them very individualistically.

00:20:09:06 - 00:20:13:07
We want to see, where am I, you know, how does this speak to me? Yes.

00:20:13:19 - 00:20:16:07
So your approach says

00:20:16:07 - 00:20:20:07
that we see us in the Psalms because we are in Christ.

00:20:20:20 - 00:20:23:19
Yes it is really. Yes, yes, yes.

00:20:23:19 - 00:20:26:12
And, it helps to play

00:20:26:12 - 00:20:26:17
I suppose what I'm what I'm saying is that I'm trying to, what I'm trying to argue here is something which I think is profoundly old.

00:20:26:17 - 00:20:30:07
against our Western individualism because we see ourselves

00:20:30:07 - 00:20:34:24
as part of the Church of Christ, not just today, but down the centuries.

00:20:34:24 - 00:20:35:15
Yeah, right.

00:20:35:15 - 00:20:39:11
Which has a profound effect on the way we read them and the way

00:20:39:11 - 00:20:45:03
we understand ourselves as a part of Christ's Church.

00:20:45:12 - 00:20:47:13
Yeah. So yes, there is that.

00:20:47:13 - 00:20:50:13
And of course, that was one of the things with the so-called Enlightenment,

00:20:50:14 - 00:20:53:03
this move towards individualism. Right.

00:20:53:03 - 00:20:58:03
And reading the Psalms in that sense of being together in

00:20:58:11 - 00:21:02:02
Christ does play against that in ways that, of course,

00:21:02:20 - 00:21:05:20
much of the world finds much easier to understand Yeah.

00:21:05:20 - 00:21:07:06
than a Western a like me.

00:21:07:06 - 00:21:09:04
Yeah. Well, that's so true.

00:21:10:13 - 00:21:13:10
Yeah.

00:21:13:10 - 00:21:14:22
To what extent

00:21:14:22 - 00:21:18:20
is it possible, then, for somebody to read the Psalms

00:21:18:20 - 00:21:23:07
and really understand them without a relation to Christ?

00:21:23:15 - 00:21:27:21
I mean, is it possible or can they only be understood in relation to Jesus?

00:21:28:09 - 00:21:30:22
I guess I'm arguing that

00:21:30:22 - 00:21:34:11
it seems to me that the New Testament is saying

00:21:34:11 - 00:21:37:11
we need to read them in Christ.

00:21:38:05 - 00:21:42:15
Of course we can, we can read them, but we have to be quite selective.

00:21:42:16 - 00:21:43:12
That's the problem.

00:21:43:12 - 00:21:47:18
If we just read them individually, we do have to pick and choose.

00:21:47:18 - 00:21:49:13
So Yeah.

00:21:49:13 - 00:21:53:05
what I sometimes call a calendar verse approach.

00:21:53:05 - 00:21:53:23
Right.

00:21:53:23 - 00:21:57:17
And some of my students at the Cornhill Training Course one year produced

00:21:57:17 - 00:22:01:24
a sort of spoof devotional calendar which they gave me,

00:22:01:24 - 00:22:05:12
which had inappropriate verses for January, February, March,

00:22:05:21 - 00:22:08:19
you know, from the Psalms, just to illustrate

00:22:08:19 - 00:22:12:06
the point that we do have to be selective if it's just going to take to me.

00:22:12:09 - 00:22:13:17
Yeah, yeah.

00:22:13:17 - 00:22:17:00
But I suppose most of us, when we first come

00:22:17:00 - 00:22:20:01
to faith in Christ, sort of do that a bit don't we?

00:22:20:01 - 00:22:21:17
We begin reading the Psalms

00:22:21:17 - 00:22:25:06
and we think, oh yes, yes, I can see that this makes sense for me.

00:22:25:18 - 00:22:28:21
And we leave other things on the side of the plate, as it were.

00:22:28:21 - 00:22:34:21
And that's … I think I'm saying that let's try and get further than that Right.

00:22:34:21 - 00:22:37:07
rather than completely rubbish that.

00:22:37:07 - 00:22:38:14
Yeah. Okay. Yeah, yeah.

00:22:38:14 - 00:22:39:22
That’s, that, that's helpful.

00:22:41:19 - 00:22:44:19
So the …

00:22:45:09 - 00:22:47:09
you … a lot of this, then, is coming from

00:22:47:09 - 00:22:50:12
you're … seeing how the New Testament sees the Psalms.

00:22:50:15 - 00:22:54:20
And, so has there been a hermeneutical shift then between how,

00:22:54:20 - 00:22:58:00
how the songs would have been seen in the Old Covenant world,

00:22:58:08 - 00:23:00:18
how they're seen by the New Testament writers?

00:23:00:18 - 00:23:04:08
And then again, is there another hermeneutical shift to how we read them

00:23:04:17 - 00:23:05:19
today?

00:23:05:19 - 00:23:09:21
I guess I would be inclined to speak in terms of clarification.

00:23:09:22 - 00:23:10:11
Okay.

00:23:10:11 - 00:23:10:17
Yeah.

00:23:10:17 - 00:23:13:20
The, the Old Covenant understands that the King

00:23:13:20 - 00:23:16:20
is the covenant head of his people. Yeah.

00:23:16:21 - 00:23:19:05
And that's just

00:23:19:05 - 00:23:22:05
mainstream Old Covenant thinking.

00:23:22:11 - 00:23:23:12
But it’s forward looking.

00:23:23:12 - 00:23:28:06
But it's forward looking, and the searching and inquiring that goes

00:23:28:06 - 00:23:33:04
with the prophetic voices then, it sort of comes into focus in Christ.

00:23:33:04 - 00:23:33:24
Right.

00:23:33:24 - 00:23:37:06
As to what's happened since then,

00:23:37:06 - 00:23:40:18
I mean, that's a huge question.

00:23:40:18 - 00:23:42:10
Do you want to go into that a bit?

00:23:42:10 - 00:23:43:24
I mean, it's Oh go on.

00:23:43:24 - 00:23:48:18
it’s, it's very interesting in the, in the Patristic period … I remember

00:23:48:18 - 00:23:53:12
when I was taught Patristics in Oxford, I was taught there are two main strands.

00:23:53:12 - 00:23:57:06
There's the Alexandrian strand, which has wild and wacky

00:23:57:06 - 00:24:00:24
people like Clement of Alexandria with wild, uncontrolled allegorising.

00:24:01:12 - 00:24:01:22
Right.

00:24:01:22 - 00:24:05:23
And then there are the sensible people, the Antiochene

00:24:06:01 - 00:24:09:11
strand like Diodore of Tarsus and Theodore of Mopsuestia.

00:24:09:11 - 00:24:12:20
And they were the good guys because they read them sensibly.

00:24:13:11 - 00:24:16:15
And the more I read round it, the more I thought, actually, it's

00:24:16:15 - 00:24:19:24
not quite as simple as that, because the, the Antiochenes,

00:24:19:24 - 00:24:25:10
I mean, Theodore of Mopsuestia was condemned at an ecumenical council

00:24:25:10 - 00:24:28:23
in Constantinople, partly for his reading of the Psalms.

00:24:29:20 - 00:24:34:03
As Bruce Waltke comments in one of his books, It's, it’s, it's

00:24:34:09 - 00:24:37:10
unusual for people to be condemned by a church council

00:24:37:10 - 00:24:38:15
for their reading of the Psalms.

00:24:38:15 - 00:24:41:06
It’s quite sobering when you're writing commentaries to think

00:24:41:06 - 00:24:42:03
this might happen to you.

00:24:43:08 - 00:24:46:08
But the, the Antiochenes …

00:24:46:22 - 00:24:49:10
I think my Oxford teachers thought they were great

00:24:49:10 - 00:24:54:02
because they were, they were sort of more like post-Enlightenment people. 

00:24:54:09 - 00:24:57:17
C: And actually, when you read some of the so-called

00:24:57:17 - 00:25:00:17
Alexandrians,

00:25:01:05 - 00:25:04:05
actually they're not as wildly uncontrolled as they...

00:25:05:00 - 00:25:07:11
Well, well, they are sometimes.

00:25:07:11 - 00:25:10:11
But, but sometimes they're on to something

00:25:10:14 - 00:25:14:19
and sometimes they're more in tune with New Testament readings.

00:25:14:20 - 00:25:17:07
T: Right. But they don't fit our modern categories very easily.

00:25:17:07 - 00:25:19:18
C: They don't fit our modern categories. No.

00:25:19:18 - 00:25:20:13
T: Yeah. Okay.

00:25:20:13 - 00:25:24:15
C: No. So I suppose what I'm what I'm saying is that I'm trying to,

00:25:25:01 - 00:25:28:15
what I'm trying to argue here is something which I think is profoundly old.

00:25:29:05 - 00:25:30:11
We'll leave that conversation there.

00:25:30:11 - 00:25:33:23
And if you're happy, we'll have a second conversation

00:25:34:06 - 00:25:36:08
and take 1 or 2 of these things a little bit further.

00:25:36:08 - 00:25:38:22
But for now, Christopher, thank you very much. Thank you.